Here’s a great tip for when you’re just starting out on your diet: Choose just two breakfasts.

In the first few weeks of a new eating plan, we get all excited and enthusiastic about how great things are going to be. We study all of our options and make a beautiful, varied, delicious menu for the week.

Stop it right there!!

Enthusiasm is great, but don’t sprint start only to run out of energy from all of the planning, shopping, and thinking of it all.

See, sometimes tons of choices just make things more difficult.

You can find a way to make it simple, delicious, and interesting all at the same time… Without losing your mind keeping track of everything.

Just choose two breakfasts from your new plan and practice them.

Alternate them or have them a few days in a row, either way is good.

What DOES matter is that these two breakfasts will become a part of your new eating mindset. Something that happens almost automatically so that you don’t have to expend any energy thinking about it, you just eat a healthy breakfast.

You can vary your choices once you’ve become a pro at breakfast – changing with seasonal foods or as your tastes change.

Eventually, you’ll have a few good breakfast choices that work for YOU and your eating plan. This makes planning and shopping easy and stress-free.

Since people always want to know what I eat, I have essentially the same thing for breakfast every day:

Now, obviously I’m a big guy, and very active, so this breakfast would be too much for most people, what’s important here is that I don’t have to plan a complicated menu, and don’t have to expend any mental energy on preparation.

On weekends – when I have more time – I go ahead and experiment with new recipes. Pork loin and apples, exotic sausages (ostrich, anyone?), paleo muffins with local honey. These experiments are fun, but during the hectic week I stick with the basics.

The take-home message for today is to: Find a breakfast or two that you like, and hang with it – don’t make things complicated early in the day